I've been messing around with various ways of improving some of my sites here on SP and would love some feedback. The goal was to improve the look without totally going into .css madness and pulling all my hair out. Since HTML is the basic tool that the page-builder here on SP uses, I've tried to stay within that. The page that I've been working on is my Echo Tower page from the Fisher Towers. It originally looked like this...

For my own pages, I'm not going to mess around too much with HTML and CSS, because I want to stick to the look and feel of the regular SP pages, but that's just me. That is, I actually use quite a lot of HTML, but in such a way that it still looks very similar.

However, I do not believe that others should see things my way at all, so if you want to make your pages look better, I think you're on the right track here. I didn't read the text, but I had a look at the layout of the Echo page and found that was an improvement over the regular SP style.

A few remarks though:

1) The page is rather wide. My screen is 1024px wide, and I like to be able to read stuff without having to scroll left and right all the time. If I scroll as far to the right as possible while still keeping the leftmost text visible, what I see of the first line is

"As climbers ... classic Finger o"

and then I would have to scroll to the right to continue reading, which is a pain, or zoom out to 90% to see it all. I've learned that one of the things that makes a page too wide for me is using an image larger than about 970px, but there are other possible causes.

2) I'm puzzled why you chose a bigger font size for the regular text. On the plus size, it means that I can solve the previous problem by zooming out to 90% and still be able to read the regular text, but I think it's much better if the page can be easily viewed without zooming out, since many people won't bother, or don't even know how to do that.In addition, the text for hyperlinks is now smaller than the regular text, which looks strange to me,

3) I noticed that you specified font ariel (and some others). I presume that's a typo, and you intended arial instead.

Thanks Rob! This is exactly the type of stuff I'm looking for. All I'm trying to do is offer pages that have a bit "snappier" look than the average page, hence the different fonts and color schemes. It sounds like the width is the biggest problem. What is the average browser width? On mine the pages all appear to be normal and no side-to-side scrolling is involved. I will down-size the images to make that fit what it needs to be. I appreciate the help. Thanks!

Brian

EDIT: I changed the dimensions for the wider photos to a width of 950. Did that change the side-scrolling issue?

I finally got Matt Lemke into using CSS. I let him use a lot of my code so long as he keeps the CSS comment that mentions me. He was very pleased when he found out how powerful and easy it was. Anyways, Brian I love the use of styling you used on your page.

I will second rgg's statement about screen resolution (mine is also 1024px). I've convinced Matt into making some of his pages more fluid (working in everyone's favor). Now that your "the developer" you have to be mindful of your audiences of how it displays in different browsers and screen resolutions. Typically we don't think of our selves as the developer when making a SP page. But that is the case because your using html to display things which is what a real life web site maker actually does!

Regarding CSS again. The cool thing about CSS is that you can use it to do just simple things without changing SP's appearance. Matt Lemke for example swapped from html to CSS to make image captions bold and orange. The code is literally this simple: table.thumb, div.thumb div {font-weight: bold; color: orange !important;}Unfortunately it has to be loaded onto a file from your host (personal site, free site, file host) because SummitPost does not allow style tags to work on pages. But it saves a lot of work! I let the style sheet do all the work for all my image borders.

@ sjarelkwint: I guess your really not a fan of my work! I even changed the SummitPost logo. If there is any interest to upgrading SP's design to a newer look, I'm sure I could help with that.

Josh Lewis wrote:If there is any interest to upgrading SP's design to a newer look, I'm sure I could help with that.

There is and we may ask for input from the community at large to see what people would like to see changed.

I have some time this winter and plan on making/help to make some fairly significant changes to SP. Over the last week, I've been educating myself (again) on the database and plan on making an upgrade to the server and database software by moving to a brand new virtual cloud server. I'm hoping the newest releases of software, along with some changes to the database, will help speed up the site (they should). After that, there is a list of things that I think SP could benefit most from and I've been discussing this with Bob. One of the things on the list is a new look and feel for the site. I'm not much of a web designer, so if there were someone who wanted to help, I'd be more than happy to have the help.

mrchad9 wrote:Ah so this is where the turning SP into MySpace discussion started.

Uhhh... no! You keep associating a new template with adding background images and such. Have you even seen a template I designed? (pardon the "Featured Mountains" drop shadow glitch) So before you go off telling me that I'll add glitter and butter to everything, we will have peer review. This will ensure a professional design or at least one better than the current design.

Are you getting paid for your work Josh? If not, then your design is not a professional one.

How many members think changing the colors and shadow boxes and such for SP is time well spent, as opposed to improving the voting system, incorporating a mechanism to update old and sparse pages, having better and more variable content on the home page, improving user interfaces, etc?

Last edited by mrchad9 on Fri Jan 11, 2013 7:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

mrchad9 wrote:Do you understand the definition of professional Josh? Saying your design is not professional does not actualy imply anything with respect to quality.

I'm pretty sure I do. But yes we both agree on that one. But you presented the public with the idea that because I'm not a payed professional, my work is not a worthy or of similar quality of a professional. Are there things I still need to learn in the world of CSS? Absolutely. That's why I'm taking classes on it. But I've made some pretty well done pages in my time that are pleasant to see and helpful for the viewability of the content.

mrchad9 wrote:How many members think changing the colors and shadow boxes and such for SP is time well spent, as opposed to improving the voting system, incorporating a mechanism to update old and sparse pages, having better and more variable content on the home page, improving user interfaces, etc?

I'm trying to be realistic Chad. I know I come off as an idealist, but I can be pretty down to earth. In this case wanting features that won't come anytime soon is not down to earth. The voting system is quite complicated. You want it changed. I definitely want it changed! There are a lot of features I want. On my spare time I have done a lot of convincing to other web developers to add features. I know what it's like to be let down and not get something that would be a huge asset to hundreds if not thousands of people.

The template does need clean up work. It is loaded with a lot of unnecessary code like bold tags around menu items and such that only act to create round corners. This was designed like this because back in the day there was no easy way to do this. Now there is via CSS. The bulk of the work would be done by me and anyone else who gets involved. This will enable Matt to use his time for other things. Server upgrades. Perhaps new features coming up. He mentioned a while back about SP v3 or something like that. That means he has the interest in adding new features.

There would also be peer review. It would be a time where there would be a preview where people could voice in their opinions. We want to help the majority (or at least that's my goal). One last thing Chad, you ought to treat Matt nicer. By calling his work "non existent" you are insulting someone who has put hours if not days into making SP a better place for all of us. Even if you don't agree with how Matt is approaching this situation, disrespecting him will make your requests way down on the list of things to do. Right now I'm trying to respect a guy who tells me that I will be the demise of SummitPost. Think about it.